The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

The extraordinary life of the Italian writer, warmonger and womaniser who was an inspiration to Mussolini

Ready and willing: Gabriele d’Annunzio in the 1880s and in uniform, c1930 (Getty)

M
ore than 70 years since his death, Gabriele d’Annunzio — the Italian
novelist, poet, politician, warmonger and womaniser — remains an ideal
subject for biography. He constantly claimed that his life was his greatest
work of art, and it was certainly a spectacle: he wrote prolifically, and
promoted himself fanatically, even once faking his death to increase
publicity. He lived in beautiful cities with beautiful women: in Florence,
Rome, Naples, Paris, Venice. He was what we would today call a sex addict,
and his prose was scandalously explicit, as well as extraordinarily
voluptuous. He invaded Fiume (now Rijeka) when parts of modern-day ­Croatia
weren’t ceded to Italy at the end of the first world war, reigning as an
eccentric commandant for more than a year and becoming a kind of “John the
Baptist” to Benito Mussolini. His life was the unique nexusat which
aestheticism, fin de ­siècle-ism, decadence, futurism, fascism and constant